A Script Given by Heaven, a Language to Unite the World (From “The Kingdom of Sejong” to “The Kingdom of Heavenly Parent”)
[Summary: The Exposition of the Divine Principle teaches that Korean, the language of the True Parents, will become the homeland language of all humanity. Joseon borrowed Chinese characters and fell into deep deference to China, and people who could not read had no way to speak up even when they were wronged. Moved by a parent’s heart for them, King Sejong proclaimed the 28 letters of the Hunminjeongeum in 1446. In Hangeul, initial, medial, and final sounds join to form one syllable, just as a father, mother, and children form one family. The principle of the True Family is built into the letters. Hangeul survived opposition from the scholar-officials, King Yeonsangun’s ban, and colonial Japan’s attempt to erase the Korean language. It finally became the national script in 1894, and it laid the foundation for ending illiteracy, the Miracle on the Han River, and the Korean Wave. Hangeul is not the invention of a lone genius. It is a script Heaven prepared through Sejong more than five hundred years in advance. Yet trends fade, so the globalization of Korean must go hand in hand with the words of True Parents. Just as Latin and Arabic spread with their scriptures, a language gains eternal life when it carries truth. Hangeul overcame its trials and fulfilled its heavenly mandate. In the same way, True Parents and the Divine Principle will overcome today’s trials and build the Kingdom of Heavenly Parent, a nation greater even than “the Kingdom of Sejong.”]
(Exposition of the Divine Principle, pp. 567–568, Korean edition) There can be no greater misfortune than this: that people who are descendants of the same parents, and who share the same feelings of joy, anger, sorrow and happiness, cannot understand one another because the languages they use to express those feelings are different. Therefore, if the ideal world of one great family attending the True Parents is to be realized, language must be unified. Because languages were confused through the Tower of Babel, which sought to exalt Satan’s will, this time, according to the principle of restoration through indemnity, the languages of all peoples must be unified into one, centered on a tower of Heaven that exalts God’s will.
Into which nation’s language, then, will they be unified? The answer is self-evident, for children learn the language of their parents. If it is true that the True Parents of humankind return in Korea, they will surely speak Korean, and so Korean will become the language of the homeland. Consequently, all peoples will have no choice but to use this homeland language. In this way, all of humanity will become one people speaking one language and will form one nation.
Through the Exposition of the Divine Principle, we have long believed that Korean will one day become the homeland language of all humanity. That is why we have taken more pride in Hangeul than almost anyone. Yet if someone had asked us what exactly makes Hangeul superior to other writing systems, and by how much, most of us could not have answered. Only now am I studying Hangeul in depth. It is the language I have used every day, as naturally as breathing, and yet I lived without truly knowing how remarkable it is. It feels as if my eyes have only just been opened. Korean communities in America and Japan probably don’t know its value either, unless they have studied it deliberately. Why didn’t we know? In the past, Korea was a poor, underdeveloped country. We envied America and admired Japan’s progress, and so Hangeul, too, was treated as something backward.
Three changes, however, have opened our eyes. First, thanks to AI, anyone can now compare Hangeul with the world’s languages in fine detail. Second, Korea’s national strength has risen into the world’s top ranks. Third, people around the world who took up Korean through K-culture have begun saying, “Korean is the best. We’re jealous.” The architecture of the letters and the logic of their sounds; nuanced adjectives and particles; emotional expressions that reach into the deepest corners of the heart; onomatopoeia and mimetic words that can expand without limit. As we came to see these differences, we finally began to recognize the true value of Korean. “So this is how amazing our script really is!”
Today I want to talk about the hardships Hangeul was born through, and the vision it holds for the future. I recently read The Kingdom of Sejong, a novel by Kim Jin-myung. Through fictional characters, it vividly brings to life the everyday struggles of ordinary people that history books could never fully capture, along with the breathtaking twists and turns behind the creation of Hangeul. Let me give you my conclusion up front: Hangeul is not the invention of a lone genius. It is a script born when Heaven worked through a king who loved his people with a parent’s heart—through his relentless determination, brilliant wisdom, and tireless passion for research. This is what I believe.
Why Joseon Became a Nation That “Served the Great”
Joseon’s deference toward China—known as sadae, “serving the great”—ran far deeper than it had in the eras of Goguryeo, Unified Silla, or Goryeo. At the time, Ming China was surrounded by many tributary states: the Ryukyu Kingdom (Okinawa), Japan, Vietnam, the Jurchens, the Mongols, and others. Among them, Joseon served the Ming more devotedly than any. Joseon was founded by Yi Seong-gye, who turned his army back at Wihwado Island and overthrew Goryeo. The first justification he gave for that retreat was isoyeokdae (以小逆大): “A small country cannot defy a great one.” Even the nation’s name was chosen by sending two options—“Joseon” and “Hwaryeong”—to the Ming court and letting it decide. King Taejo sent the Ming emperor a written oath promising loyalty for generations to come, and the Ming recognized Joseon as its most faithful vassal state, “the Eastern Land of Courtesy.”
Joseon adopted the Ming legal code (the Great Ming Code) and the Ming calendar, and borrowed its books and its script from China as well. Whenever a new king of Joseon took the throne, he had to be formally invested by the Ming emperor. And when the emperor’s envoy arrived, the king and his officials did not receive him at Gyeongbokgung Palace. Instead, they went out beyond the city walls to Yeongeunmun, the “Gate of Welcoming Grace,” at Mohwagwan, the “Hall of Admiring China”—the very spot where Independence Gate stands today in Seoul’s Seodaemun district. At times, officials cared more about how the Ming saw things than about their own king.
At the root of this deference was writing. In Joseon, the most fearsome power was neither wealth nor the sword, but the written word. Whether or not you could read decided whether you were a yangban aristocrat or a commoner, whether the path to public office opened or closed, and how heavily taxes and military duty fell on you. In theory, anyone could learn to read. In practice, it was not a script just anyone could learn. For farmers tied down by the daily struggle to survive, mastering those difficult Chinese characters was close to impossible. Literacy was so rare that it is said only four or five people in a hundred could read. Then as now, people who cannot read end up being treated like servants. Even when laws existed, the illiterate suffered injustice simply because they did not know what the laws said. This was not unique to Joseon. It was true of most of the world at the time—even of China, the very home of the characters. In the hierarchy of that age, the Chinese emperor stood above the king, and above the emperor stood the sages: Confucius, Mencius, and the rest. Even the Chinese emperor followed the proper order between ruler and subject as taught in the sages’ books. So the scholar-officials, who read the Four Books and Three Classics every day, always looked up to China’s sages and emperor, and the sense of inferiority that came from borrowing someone else’s script became the deepest root of their deference. Because neither the people nor the nation could escape the yoke of Chinese characters, sliding into deference to China was all but inevitable.
Speaking One Way, Writing Another, Reading a Third
There was an even more fundamental language problem. Korean and Chinese have different word orders. Korean follows “subject + object + verb,” while Chinese, like English, follows “subject + verb + object.” Our ancestors created systems called hyangchal and idu, which borrowed Chinese characters to write in Korean word order. To make this clearer, let’s compare a single sentence.
| Type | Written as | Feature |
| Korean | 나는 교회에 갑니다. (Naneun gyohoe-e gamnida. — “I church-to go.”) | Subject + object + verb |
| English / Chinese | I go to church. / 我去教堂 | Subject + verb + object |
| Idu style | 我隱 敎堂良 去爲尼 | Used by government clerks in official documents |
Yet hyangchal and idu still required a knowledge of Chinese characters, so for ordinary people the door remained shut. Clerks in local government offices wrote documents in idu, and those who could not read were ruled by those who could. King Sejong and the scholar-officials wrote strictly in Classical Chinese, following Chinese word order. When they read those texts aloud or taught them, they pronounced the characters with Korean sounds and inserted Korean grammatical markers called gugyeol—and in everyday life, they spoke pure Korean. For example, the opening line of the Analects, 子曰 學而時習之 不亦說乎, was read aloud as “Jawal hasidoe, hagisiseupji-myeon bulyeogyeolho-a.” It means, “Confucius said: To learn and to practice what you have learned from time to time—is that not a joy?” In other words, speaking, writing, and reading were three separate things. As a result, ordinary people never even had a chance to learn. They spent their whole lives unable to read, denied basic dignity, and ruled by those who could.
The preface to the Hunminjeongeum, proclaimed in 1446, captures that heart exactly: “Because the speech of our country differs from that of China, it does not fit Chinese characters. For this reason, there are many among the common people who have something they wish to say, yet in the end cannot express what is in their hearts. Moved with compassion for them, I have newly created twenty-eight letters, wishing only that everyone may learn them easily and use them comfortably every day.” These are not the words of a monarch. They are the words of a parent worried about struggling children. The script Sejong dreamed of was one the people could learn at a glance, one that could write down sounds exactly as they came from the mouth, one that would break the scholar-officials’ monopoly, and one that would make Joseon strong. The Hunminjeongeum was the flower of that spirit of independence.
The script born this way consisted of 17 initial consonants and 11 medial vowels—28 letters in all.
Father letters (17 consonants, 子音): ㄱ ㅋ ㆁ ㄷ ㅌ ㄴ ㅂ ㅍ ㅁ ㅈ ㅊ ㅅ ㆆ ㅎ ㅇ ㄹ ㅿ
Mother letters (11 vowels, 母音): ㆍ ㅡ ㅣ ㅗ ㅏ ㅜ ㅓ ㅛ ㅑ ㅠ ㅕ
The consonants were modeled on the shape of the speech organs as each sound is made. ㄱ depicts the root of the tongue blocking the throat; ㄴ, the tip of the tongue touching the upper gums; ㅁ, the shape of the mouth; ㅅ, the shape of a tooth; ㅇ, the shape of the throat. Strokes were then added to show a sound becoming stronger. The vowels were modeled on Heaven (ㆍ), Earth (ㅡ), and Human (ㅣ)—cheon-ji-in (天地人). The order of the universe and the human body meet inside a single letter. And here I see the principle of the family. If you write out 참부모, the Korean word for “True Parents,” one letter after another in a row, you get “ㅊㅏㅁ ㅂㅜ ㅁㅗ.” It’s hard to read. But gather the initial, medial, and final sounds into syllable blocks, and it becomes wonderfully easy to read. We can think of the initial consonant as the father letter, the vowel as the mother letter, and the final consonant as the child letter. Father letters like ㄱ, ㄴ, and ㄷ cannot form a complete sound on their own; only when they meet mother letters like ㅏ, ㅓ, and ㅗ is a sound born. And when a child letter is added at the bottom as a final consonant, the number of possible syllables multiplies enormously—just as children make a family flourish. Every single syllable is the picture of a father, a mother, and children coming together to form one family. It’s truly astonishing. The principle of the True Family is built right into the letters. This is a script Heaven created so that, together with Korean’s richly developed honorifics—vertical and horizontal—it could help build True Families.
A Script Born into Opposition and Persecution
When such an easy script appeared, the royal court was thrown into an uproar. In 1444, Choe Man-ri, deputy director of the Hall of Worthies (Jiphyeonjeon), and six other scholars submitted a joint petition. Its main points were as follows.
| Reason for Opposition | Details |
| ① Violates deference | Goes against the duty of serving and revering China |
| ② A barbarian script | Having one’s own script, like the Mongols, Jurchens, and Japanese, means making oneself a barbarian |
| ③ Decline of learning | An easy vernacular script would lead scholars away from Neo-Confucianism and Chinese characters |
| ④ Reckless haste | Spending effort on something not urgent, and pushing ahead without consulting the high ministers |
Sejong rebuked them sternly—“Do you even know the rhyme books?”—and refused to back down. But most scholar-officials, while not opposing him openly, stayed silent, fearing friction with the Ming and clinging to the prejudice that this was “a vulgar script for the uneducated.” Even after Sejong’s death, the scholar-officials never treated Hangeul as the nation’s official script. Government documents, civil service examinations, the royal annals, and literary collections were all written in Classical Chinese until the very end of Joseon. Hangeul was looked down on as eonmun, the “vulgar script,” or amkeul, the “women’s script”—fit only for women, commoners, and low-ranking clerks. Yet thanks to Sejong’s determination and royal authority, Hangeul did not disappear; it quietly seeped into the lives of the people. Even though it was proclaimed by the king himself, it was scorned. Had it been created by a scholar with a vision of his own, he would surely have been branded a traitor and put to death. Persecution followed. In 1504, when anonymous letters in Hangeul criticizing King Yeonsangun began to circulate, he forbade anyone to teach, learn, or use Hangeul, and ordered Hangeul books gathered up and burned. A ban had been imposed less than sixty years after the script was proclaimed. I believe Heaven protected Hangeul by bringing this persecution to an end through the Jungjong Restoration of 1506, which deposed Yeonsangun. Later, under Japanese colonial rule from 1937 to 1945, there was an attempt to wipe out the Korean language altogether. It barely survived until liberation.
Finally, in 1894, during the Gabo Reform, King Gojong declared in Royal Edict No. 1, the “Regulations on Official Documents”: “All laws and edicts shall be based on the national script, with a Chinese translation attached or written in mixed Korean and Chinese script.” Four hundred forty-eight years after its proclamation, the “vulgar script” had at last become gungmun (國文)—the nation’s primary script. The journey that followed looks like this.
| Year | Event |
| 1896 | The Independent (Dongnip Sinmun), founded by Seo Jae-pil and others, uses all-Hangeul text and word spacing, awakening the public |
| Early 1910s | Ju Si-gyeong and his students give the script the name “Hangeul,” meaning “the great and right single script” |
| 1921 | The Korean Language Research Society is founded and begins work on standard spelling and a dictionary |
| 1933 | The Unified Hangeul Orthography is established, forming the backbone of today’s spelling rules |
| Around 1970 | The Park Chung-hee government’s Hangeul-only policy shifts official documents and textbooks to Hangeul |
| 1989 | UNESCO establishes the King Sejong Literacy Prize |
| 1997 | The Hunminjeongeum Haerye (the original explanatory edition) is inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register |
At liberation, the illiteracy rate stood at nearly 80 percent; thanks to Hangeul, it fell below 10 percent within a single generation. And in the age of computers and smartphones, the principle of combining consonants and vowels into blocks, along with the Cheonjiin keypad, has revealed Hangeul to be among the fastest and most scientific scripts in the world to type.
What would Korean look like today if Sejong had never created Hangeul? Most of us would still be bound to difficult Chinese characters, unable to read. Faced with colonial Japan’s campaign to erase our national identity, our language might have vanished with no script to record it. The eradication of illiteracy after liberation, the Miracle on the Han River, Korea’s rise as an IT powerhouse, the Korean Wave—none of it would have been possible.
So Hangeul is no accident. Heaven prepared a script for this people more than five hundred years in advance. It was Heaven’s answer to the earnest longing of a king who loved his people with a parent’s heart. I believe Hangeul is the script Heaven created through King Sejong.
What is the core theme of the Epic of the Korean People as a Chosen Nation? It is that the Korean people were chosen long ago and prepared as a special people to save the world. The roots of the Korean people preserved in our founding myths, a religious culture that revered Heaven, the virtues of loyalty, filial piety and fidelity, the Korean language, the culture of heart, and the Korean Wave—all of these were stepping stones. Upon them, through the birth of the True Parents, the Divine Principle, and Holy Mother Han, the Epic of the Korean People as a Chosen Nation is completed in Korea and goes out into the world to fulfill the dream of Heavenly Parent. What matters is this: if even one of these pieces were missing, it could not be completed.
If Hangeul, a phonetic script, gives communication its breadth, the roots of Chinese characters, an ideographic script, give thought its depth. Once you learn that the character for filial piety, 孝, combines “old person” (老) and “child” (子)—a picture of a child carrying an elder on his back—filial piety touches you far more deeply. Though they are hard to learn, the meanings of Chinese characters are a great help in advancing truth and literature and in cultivating a deep inner character. So rather than mixing the two scripts indiscriminately, I hope we will write in convenient Hangeul on the surface while systematically teaching and savoring the Chinese-character roots beneath it, cultivating a truly refined language culture. A language with both breadth and depth—that is a language that can embrace the whole world.
Now let me share the most important point. The globalization of Korean must go hand in hand with the words of True Parents. If it advances on Hangeul alone, or on the Korean Wave alone, it will inevitably run aground, because trends fade. Look at history. Latin, carried by Christianity, served as the common language of Europe for more than a thousand years, and Arabic spread across a vast world together with the scripture of Islam. A language gains eternal life only when it carries deep truth, not just sounds and symbols. To build one world, one culture, one truth, and one faith, we need one language. As in the passage we read today, children learn the language of their parents. The language spoken by humanity’s True Parents becomes the homeland language of humankind. Look at our neighbors in the Chinese-character cultural sphere. In China, people must master thousands of characters; in Japan, people use three scripts together—kanji, hiragana, and katakana—and must read a single kanji in several different ways. Both still carry the heavy burden of their writing systems. In light of history’s law of indemnity, I pray that the day will come when Japan, which once tried to erase Hangeul, will instead take the lead as a nation in embracing its value. Then China, too, will have no choice but to use Hangeul rather than English. And then, almost overnight, Hangeul could become the homeland language of the world. This is what is foretold at the very end of the Divine Principle.
Just as Hangeul, after enduring harsh trials, was born with a heavenly mandate to become the one script shared by all the world’s people, so too our True Parents and the Divine Principle, though now enduring harsh trials, have appeared with a heavenly mandate and will surely fulfill the dream of Heavenly Parent. True Parents and the Divine Principle will turn misfortune into blessing and fulfill the final religious responsibility of bringing all the peoples of the world into one world of the culture of heart, under our one Heavenly Parent. More than five hundred years ago, a king turned the pain of his lowliest subjects into letters. In the same way, when Hangeul carries the words of True Parents and opens the path to peace and shared prosperity for humanity, we will at last go beyond “the Kingdom of Sejong” to build “the Kingdom of Heavenly Parent.” Aju!
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